Fascinating Facts and Trivia

Being constantly offended doesn't mean you're right

It just means you are too narcissistic to tolerate opinions different than yours.

The average person will spend six months of their life waiting for red lights to turn green.

The inventor of the frisbee was turned into a frisbee after he died.

Alec Guinness and James Dean met by chance in September 1955. Guinness would later claim that he had a premonition that the young actor would be killed in his Porsche 550 Spyder and that he’d cautioned Dean not to get into the car, warning him that he’d be dead within a week if he did.

Celebrities have been known to make all manner of wacky claims. But, when an actor as apparently solid and sensible as Alec Guinness made such an off-the-wall claim, people sat up and took notice.

In recent years, there have been efforts online to conflate Guinness’s premonition with his Star Wars persona. Yet, it seems Guinness was not given to flights of fancy. In fact, he once dismissed Star Wars as ‘fairy tale rubbish’.

In September 1955, Guinness arrived in Los Angeles after a long haul flight from Copenhagen. Exhausted but hungry, he agreed to have dinner with Thelma Moss, an actress and screenwriter with whom he had worked.

After being turned away from a number of restaurants because Moss was wearing trousers, they went to a less formal Italian restaurant, Villa Capri in Hollywood. Yet, they were turned away from that restaurant as well because there were no available tables.

As they walked away from the restaurant, Guinness heard the sound of “running, sneakered feet” behind them. He turned and found himself face to face with James Dean. “You want a table?” Dean asked. “Join me. My name is James Dean.”
At the time of the chance encounter, Guinness had already received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Lavender Hill Mob, and (although it hadn’t helped in the restaurants) he was quickly noticed by the younger, method actor. On the other hand, it seems that the older, classically trained, British actor had not recognised James Dean. Of Dean’s three great movies, only East of Eden had been released.

Hungry and grateful, Guinness and Moss readily followed Dean. Before they reached the restaurant, Dean turned into a car park and said, “I’d like to show you something.” It was a silver sports car wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon.

“It’s just been delivered,” said Dean “I haven’t even driven it yet.” Guinness thought the car looked “sinister”. “How fast is it?” he asked. “She’ll do a hundred and fifty,” replied Dean.

“Exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean’s kindness, I heard myself saying in a voice I could hardly recognise as my own, ‘Please, never get in it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week.’”

“Dean laughed. ‘Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean!’”

The following Friday, Dean was driving his new Porsche, dubbed the ‘Little Bastard’, from Los Angeles to a road race in Salinas. With him was his mechanic, Rolf Wütherich.

Late in the afternoon, a 1950 Ford Custom Coupe driven by Donald Turnupseed turned left in front of Dean’s vehicle leaving him no time to take evasive action. The Porsche was travelling at speed when it struck the Ford almost head-on. Dean was fatally injured. Turnupseed and Wütherich survived the wreck.

The chance of a coin landing heads-up is not 50-50

When you flip a coin, physics, not probability, determines how it will land.

Mathematician Persi Diaconis found that a coin is slightly more likely to land on the face that was up when you flipped it.

The way a coin lands is not “random”; it’s easy, with a little practice, to manipulate your coin flip so that it lands the way you want it.

What’s more, if you’re spinning a coin, it’s more likely to land tails up, since the heads side weighs slightly more.

The shortest sentence in English is “Go.”

Yes, “Go,” all of two letters is a grammatically correct English sentence.

It’s only a sentence, though, if it’s a command, because then “you” is the understood subject.

It’s commanding the listener to go.

If you’d rather a sentence with a separate word as the subject, “I am” is the shortest sentence, with three letters.

People can suffer from a psychological disorder called Boanthropy that makes them believe that they are a cow. They try to live their life as a cow.

The first roller coaster was used to transport coal down a hill. After people found that it could reach speeds up to 50 miles per hour, tourists asked to ride on it for a few cents.

(10-01-2021 20:01 )Carl-Gen X Wrote:  People can suffer from a psychological disorder called Boanthropy that makes them believe that they are a cow. They try to live their life as a cow.

Yeh, I know one or two women with that disorder.

Boeing uses potatoes to test their in-flight Wi-Fi, as they reflect and absorb the signals similarly to people. The project is called Synthetic Personnel Using Dialectic Substitution- or SPUDS.